Mystery Man (16 page)

As he left, I glanced across the road and saw Alison at her window. She pointed to her left and held up five spread fingers. I nodded. As soon as she'd given her statement she'd had to rush back to work; and as I'd still been busy giving mine we hadn't been able to speak openly either about the events of the previous evening, or the dramatic developments of the morning.

I thought we might walk up together, but by the time I pulled the shutters down, peeled off the toast and deposited it in a street bin, she'd already left the jeweller's. I just caught a glimpse of her entering Starbucks. The police remained busy next door, and the pavement outside was still cordoned off. The hearse was gone.

Starbucks was busy. Everyone was talking about the murder. I caught little fragments of it as I looked for Alison. I found her upstairs, at a window table for two; from her chair she could look back along Botanic Avenue to the shop, and the police activity. I sat with my back to it.

'I bought you a skinny cinnamon dolce latte,' she said. They'll bring it up in a minute. Busy.'

I smiled my thanks. It was a false smile. It was
not
the next beverage on the menu. She had skipped two. If I even touched it, it would negate three weeks' work.

'I'm sorry about the toast,' I said. 'There was a family emergency.'

'
I'm
sorry about the toast,' she responded. 'It was a childish act of revenge.'

I nodded. She nodded.

'Last night,' she said, 'what a story.'

'Six million Jews,' I said, 'what a bummer.'

'I would love to have seen her dance,' said Alison. 'It must have been . . .
transcendent.
What kind of family emergency?'

'My mother. She takes funny turns.'

Alison smiled. 'You make her sound like a comedian. Funny turns.' I nodded. She was far from a comedian. 'Is she okay?'

'Yes. Of course. Thank you for asking. She never has a headache, it's always a stroke, do you know what I mean?'

'And the one time you do ignore it, it
will
be a stroke.' She understood. I was off the hook. The skinny cinnamon dolce lattes arrived. 'So what are we going to do?'

'About?'

She rolled her eyes. She leaned forward. 'The
case.
The
murder.
The
assassin.
'

'Not an assassin,' I corrected. 'An assassin murders important people.'

'So
what
? What are we going to do about him? Why didn't we tell the police? Am I going to spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder? Are you going to have to keep a gun underneath your counter? What's going to happen to Daniel Trevor? Is Rosemary really dead? Who killed Manfredd? Is Anne safe in Purdysburn?'

'I'm allergic to cinnamon,' I said.

'Since when?'

'Childhood, but I have good days.'

She studied me for a long time. She shook her head, but it did not seem unduly negative. 'There's just something about you, isn't there?'

'Is there?'

'Sometimes you are absolutely manic and there's no talking to you. Now you have this kind of Zen calmness and there's still no talking to you.' I shrugged. 'It's just washing over you. It's like someone throws a stone in a pond and there are all these waves, and the people who own the toy yachts get panic-stricken, yet you know that very soon everything will settle down again. I wish I could be like that. I hardly slept last night. But seriously, what are we going to do?'

I shrugged again.

'Of course being all Zen can be really annoying when you're trying to have a serious conversation.
What are we going to do?
What do you think of that detective? Do you think we should trust him? Because we can't go on like this, can we?'

'Well,' I said, 'maybe we can. Maybe we can afford to be a little bit more relaxed. Look – now that the police have discovered Malcolm's body, well they'll be investigating a murder, won't they? If they're any good at all that will lead them to Rosemary, and that will also then become a murder inquiry. So I'm thinking that the killer must be lying low. Most probably he's back in Germany. And anyway – we were worried that we were next on his death list, but really, who's to say we're even on it? The reason he killed Rosemary was because she was planning to publish a book that might have revealed some secret about him. Perhaps for safety he killed Malcolm and Manfredd as well. But maybe that's where it ends – it's pretty clear that Anne Mayerova isn't going to ever write the rest of her book; and even if she did, Daniel has had too big a fright to even contemplate publishing it. The secret is safe, maybe he doesn't
need
to kill anyone else.'

'But what if he thinks you're still investigating . . .?'

'We don't know for sure if he's even
aware
of me. Daniel told Manfredd that I was involved, but we don't know that Manfredd told his killer, or if he did, how much. Why would he?'

'So what are you suggesting?'

'That we let the police do their job. If they don't uncover the whole thing about Rosemary well, we can make an anonymous call. We keep a reasonable eye out for trouble, but I really think we should just try and forget about the whole thing. One of these days another case, a much easier one, is just going to walk into the shop, and maybe we can tackle that together. It'll be fun. What do you say?'

She thought about that. She took a sip of her latte. After a while she said, 'So you're just going to let
The Case of the Dancing Jews
remain unsolved?'

'Absolutely,' I said.

Over the next few days things began to return to abnormal in No Alibis. Our summer sale was not a huge success, even with the 5% off stickers I had Jeff attach to our least popular books. I wasn't particularly worried. I see the
need
to attract customers into the store, I just don't often feel the
want.
Yes, I could go crazy and push it up to 7 or 8 per cent, but what then to do with the riff-raff it was sure to attract? Those who poke their heads through the door and say, 'Oh I'm just looking for something a bit rubbish to read on the beach.' Or even worse, 'something light'.

Fuck off!

Of course, I don't turn sales away, but more than once I've slipped a Henning Mankell into their bag of books, telling them he makes the master, John D. MacDonald, 'look like a shit', in the full knowledge that it won't be disturbed until they're lying in the sand. Only then do they discover I've sold them the original Swedish version. Sometimes I just laugh and laugh.

We actually closed for the Twelfth of July holiday.
Really
closed, the first time since No Alibis opened. Usually I would just have the shutters pulled down three-quarter-length so that the bully boys in band uniforms wouldn't accuse me of treason, but those in the know were
in the know.
You cannot just cut off an addict's supply, there must always be an outlet. So four or five times during the day a customer would saunter past the store, keeping an eagle eye out for military-looking Protestants and then when absolutely sure that the coast was clear, dip under the shutters and inside for their fix of hit lit, like dress-down Sherlocks slipping into a Parker Knoll version of an opium den.

But not this year.

This year Alison took me on a picnic.

I warned her beforehand that I didn't want to go out of Belfast, having in mind the flies and the cows, and she laughed and said, 'What're you frightened of, Dutch elm disease?' It was seventh on my list, but there was no point in mentioning it. I don't like being made fun of. That was also on the list.

As a compromise, we sat in the grounds of City Hall. She'd made sandwiches. I picked through the ones my stomach could handle while she showed me several of the comics she'd drawn. I thought they were fantastic. I am not biased. I know what I'm talking about. I asked where I could buy them and she said, don't be silly, you can
have
them. I said, no, I mean, to sell in the shop and she said she only had a few copies she ran off from her computer printer.

'And you're
giving
them to me?' She nodded and smiled. 'There is no such thing as a free picnic,' I observed.

She lay back on the blanket, shades on, enjoying the sun. 'Well,' she said, 'I may want a kiss later.'

'You'll be lucky.'

I laughed. She laughed. She laughed because she thought I was joking. I laughed because I knew I'd be home long before that, broken hearted and embarrassed and full of anger because I'd done something wrong or stupid.

But before the hour was out she rolled over beside me and screwed her face up and said, 'What's wrong with your eyes?'

'I'm myopic.'

'No, I don't mean . . .'

Then there were the cataracts and diabetes and . . .

She was leaning over me. 'No . . . I think there's . . . close them a moment.'

I closed them.

She kissed me on the lips.

Then she lay back.

It is a mark of how shocked and yet comfortable I was that I did not even think of reaching for an antiseptic wipe.

With the country virtually closed down for the next two weeks – one day of official holiday the rest to recover – DI Robinson returned from somewhere doubtless cheap and nasty sporting his Ulster tan, red faced, peeling and with his freckles standing out like liver spots, and somewhat sheepishly revealed that he no longer needed to talk to us about the murder of Malcolm Carlyle, because they were no longer certain that it was in fact a murder. The body had been so decomposed that it had been impossible to establish a cause of death, and in the absence of any evidence to the contrary – no bullets or fractures found during the autopsy and no obvious signs of a struggle (the files on the floor might easily have tipped over when he collapsed, perhaps from a heart attack) – they did not intend to pursue the matter unless new evidence emerged. I pointed out that he had been decorated with several dozen Pine Fresh trees, which wasn't something he was likely to do to himself, unless it was some new and extreme perversion that hadn't yet come to public attention, though it might well have its own premium rate website, and DI Robinson said, well, all we can guess is that it's someone's idea of a joke. Maybe kids broke in not long after he died, and decorated him for a laugh. Kids these days – they're like that. They're so inured to death that it doesn't faze them at all. Every day they're killing people.

'What's that game . . .
Grand Theft Auto
? Shooting pregnant women in drive-bys, the mind boggles. Have you played it?'

I shook my head. I don't play console games. The bright flickering lights can induce my epilepsy.

He said, 'I heard on the grapevine that you do a bit of detecting in your spare time.'

'Not really,' I said.

He nodded around my shelves. 'That's what I'd like to do, good old-fashioned detective work, without all the bloody paperwork, without the need for back-up, or forensics, or to have to prove everything in a bloody court. Just to use your brain to work it out, invite all the suspects to a meeting, and explain how you solved the case and then point out the guilty party who then conveniently takes the gentleman's way out. Isn't that how it should be?'

Every once in a while you meet an idiot who fantasises about living in an Agatha Christie world, but it's rarely an actual detective. It displayed, however, a softer side to DI Robinson, which was, I suppose, welcome. Still, I remained on my guard, aware of the dangers of entrapment – he might well have been trying to lull me into a false sense of security so that I would reveal what my involvement
really
was, or indeed he might have somehow stumbled on my secret night-time activity and been after my nail for the scratching of vehicles with personalised number plates, which was still nestling in a tub of I Can't Believe It's Not Butter in the fridge.

As it turned out, he was surprisingly knowledgeable about crime fiction and confessed to being an admirer of Georges Simenon, unusual these days, and to have once attended a performance by the musician and detective novelist Kinky Friedman. Although I'm not a great admirer of Mr Friedman, I do stock him, and thought it would be an interesting experiment to offer DI Robinson one of his books.

'As it happens,' I said, 'I have a copy of
The Love Song of J Edgar Hoover
here, signed by Kinky himself. Going for thirty quid.'

I fetched it down for him.

'Do you know,' he said, turning it over in his hands, 'I just might.'

'Tell you what,' I said, 'I'll do it for twenty-seven.'

'Deal,' he said.

He handed over the cash and I put it in the till and said, 'Would you like a receipt?'

Now if you give someone a receipt automatically, that's fair enough; but unless you think there's a chance you might want your money back or want to exchange something you would surely automatically say no, especially if it has to be written out by hand. I mean, you can understand wanting a receipt for a pair of trousers that might not fit or a shirt that your wife might not approve of, but who ever takes a
book
back to a shop, particularly a shop that has a sign taped to the wall that says
No Refunds Under ANY Circumstances
? So I thought, if he asks for a receipt, then that's a sure indication that the cash he's paid me is from police funds, that he's using it to butter me up so that I'll spill the beans about Malcolm Carlyle, but he needs a receipt to satisfy the number-crunchers at CID, to claim the money back from them. Obviously if he was going undercover doing drug deals with Belfast gangsters he wasn't going to ask for a receipt, but under
these
circumstances he probably thought it wouldn't raise the slightest whiff of suspicion.

'No thanks,' he said.

It was the classic double bluff.

I put the book in a No Alibis bag and he thanked me. He took another look around the shop. 'Nice spot,' he said. 'I'm sure I'll be back.'

I nodded. I was sure he would. And it would have been sooner rather than later if he'd known that I'd spent 90 per cent of our conversation with one hand beneath the counter, curled around the handle of a meat cleaver, because it had suddenly struck me that he might not just be an innocent book-collector or a nosy cop, he might also have been hired by the Odessa to murder me now that two weeks had passed and the heat was off
The Case of the Dancing Jews.